One big issue is that we old-school programmers are used to dealing with 'characters'. One character = one item displayed on screen. Unicode changes things around a lot, with terms such as "code points", "glyphs", ... and even when you use UTF-16 encoding (windows' unicode format), one 16-bit isn't necessarily enough to display one glyph on the screen.

To make matters worse, things like comparing strings for equality becomes very hard - should the german ß be treated equally to "ss"? Some glyphs may look equal on screen, but be different characters. A glyph can be constructed by multiple code points in different order (this can be fixed via canonization though). And what about upper/lower casing? Not every language supported by unicode has a concept of this.

Too bad the entire world wasn't colonized by England, and all previous history/culture/LANGUAGE burnt :p

iphigenie: it was meant jokingly, in frustration. I really would wish that we'd have only one language to bother about, though, and English wouldn't be the worst choice for that. It's sane computing wise, and while there's a lot of exceptions and quirks, it's a very rich language with a very rich vocabulary (exhume always comes to mind - a verb for "dig up dead people", how crazy is that ).

interesting choice, exhume - 1783, from Fr. exhumer, from M.L. exhumare, from L. ex- "out of" + humare "bury," from humus "earth." An earlier form was exhumate (1548), taken directly from the M.L. (http://www.etymonlin...ex.php?search=exhume) no latin no french we would have missed such a worthy word

F0dder - I did smile, and that's why i replied as a joke too - there *is* more to english culture than boiled food, I think, there's.... there's....

And you are right about unicode being a right pain from a technical point of view. I cant count the issues unicode has caused me in web development, but it was a lot of wasted hours and half my 20 white hairs come from it.

Roboform - Since I got Roboform, I have actually followed the advice I always gave others and assigned unique passwords to various web services. My Roboform password is pretty much a string of random characters that correspond somewhat to a sentence that was written on something on my desk when I first set it up, so I feel secure that it won't be easy to break.

Office 2007 - The more I use it, the more I like it. I can't work efficiently with earlier versions now that I am used to the ribbon.

Roboform - Since I got Roboform, I have actually followed the advice I always gave others and assigned unique passwords to various web services. My Roboform password is pretty much a string of random characters that correspond somewhat to a sentence that was written on something on my desk when I first set it up, so I feel secure that it won't be easy to break.

Do you mean, you have a master password for Roboform that then runs different passwords for different services; or, that you've assigned them all different passwords in Roboform as well? I thought the former approach was usual. If the latter, how do you remember them all?

I have one master password for Roboform and unique passwords for various web services, accounts, etc. Yes, that's the usual way to use Roboform, but before I started using it, I just had a few passwords that I used for everything.

Zenware for full screen distraction free creative writing. No whistles and bells, just empty screen, you and your words. WriteMonkey is light, fast, and perfectly handy for those who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter but live in modern times.

Write Monkey is a writer's tool. It comes up as a blank screen that you can type on. But beneath that simple interface there are a host of features just a right click or keystroke away. Mouse or command key - the choice is yours. (F1 brings up the help screen. See below)

(This screenshot shows the fullscreen view reduced to a window. It can be toggled back and forth by hitting ESC F11)

There's even a feature to turn on a typewriter sound for those of us old enough to appreciate the crutch that old clickety-clack provides.

Does not require installation. Just unzip to a pendrive (or the directory of your choice) and get writing.